Currently our website is hosted on a server based in Canada. We are an Australian company mainly focusing on attracting Australians to our site.

We already have a .com.au address causing us to show up in Australia sites only searches, but ranking rather poorly. Would switching to an Australian based server increase our ranking on Australian based searches?

It should not make a difference, because you already have a .com.au domain, so that is enough to get you ranked in Australian engines. However, if you did not have .au domain, then it would make a difference.

I agree with quadra it should not make a difference based on the extension.

If you are going to switch from Canada you should think about hosting in U.S. instead. Sites hosted in the U.S. can still rank very well in foreign search engines including Canadian and Australian ones.

If the rankings are not present with a .com,.org,.net etc. address in the foreign search engines like Google AU and CA then you can just develop the same domain name with a specific country extension like .es for Spanish search engines if that's where you wanted to show up.

Concentrate on targeted backlinks from other sites with .com.au extensions and you will rank better in Google AU.

Thanks for the information quadra and coop99. I was getting worried that our hosting that we had just renewed may have been holding us back in the ranking stakes as I recently read on another website (don't know if it is credible) that google also checks where your server IP address is located.

Just get the .com.au address and that one should show up in Google local there. It will not hurt to have listings in both as the more places you are listed the better. If someone is really interested in your services and you can accommodate it shouldn't matter what country you're located in.

It's up to you really, or personal preference.

It sounds like you really just want to move hosts. Just make sure if you decide to move hosting countries that you do some research first to make sure you do not have the site down for too long.

coop99 wrote:Just get the .com.au address and that one should show up in Google local there. It will not hurt to have listings in both as the more places you are listed the better. If someone is really interested in your services and you can accommodate it shouldn't matter what country you're located in.

It's up to you really, or personal preference.

It sounds like you really just want to move hosts. Just make sure if you decide to move hosting countries that you do some research first to make sure you do not have the site down for too long.

Thanks for the quick reply coop99. We will be making sure that we have at least a 1 month overlap between the two hosts to give us enough time to get everything set up before we transfer the domain name across.